Double Fine’s new game “Hack n’ Slash” provides an incredibly unique and interesting take on a classic genre. Double Fine Games, makers of “Brutal Legends” and “Psychonauts,” recently released a new game called “Hack n’ Slash.” In it you play a plucky young adventurer accompanied by a floating sprite and wielding a magic sword. Sound familiar? The game looks and feels a lot like the classic top down Zelda games with one important distinction. The main character’s sword is actually a USB stick that allows you to edit game files by plugging it into your enemies and your surroundings.

The game consists primarily of logic puzzles that have you editing game files to accomplish tasks. Locked door? No problem, set “DoorLocked” to false and bam. Fireballs making it hard to progress? Hack the flamethrower and set their damage to 0. All manner of enemies become trivial when all you need to do is change their faction from bad to good. Who says hacking doesn’t make the world a better place?

The graphics are bright and fun, and the character design is reflective of Double Fine’s unusual style. Character dialogue is reliably entertaining with your sprite playing the role of comic relief. Some of the games puzzles can be daunting. Certain puzzles have you altering the algorithms of the games core functions to change the way it runs. These can be extremely confusing and if you enter in an invalid value you can actually crash the game. Thankfully they thought to put in a failsafe and it will just restart you wherever you left off. It is definitely not for the faint of heart or those without strong logical reasoning skills but if you can master its puzzles it can be extremely rewarding.

The most interesting part about the game is its casual lack of concern for the fourth wall. It takes all the normal precautions that video game makers take to hide the fact that you are playing a video game and shatters them into tiny pieces. It then takes those tiny pieces and builds a compelling story out of them. The fact that you are in a video game is an assumed part of the story line and a necessary piece of information for you as a player. It is so intrinsic to the plot line that it is never actually stated but is assumed. Double fine knocks another one out of the park and delivers a completely unique gaming experience that promises to provide hours of entertainment, if you know anything about Boolean code.